W. F. Morris was one of the most acclaimed novelists to write about trench life during WWI. Here, his grandson David remembers him, and shows how his legacy endures.
W. F. Morris (second from the left) with his fellow junior officers circa 1916.
‘Oh What a Lovely War!’ was exactly the right show to direct in November 2014. It was to be my last year before retiring as Head of Drama and Creative Arts at one of the largest comprehensives in England and was, of course, the centenary year of the beginning of WW1. My grandfather Wilfred Frederick Morris had died in 1969 when I was only 12 but the knowledge he had fought in the Great War had always given me a sense of personal connection with that terrible conflict.
This still controversial play, a musical devised by Joan Littlewoods Theatre Workshop, changed popular perceptions of the Great War when first performed in London in the early 1960s. It re-examined the myths and history of the conflict based on Alan Clark’s analysis that the British ‘Tommys’ were ‘lions lead by donkeys’. It still shapes much conventional wisdom today and was even attacked by Michael Gove as unpatriotic nearly 50 years later. As director I needed some first-hand insight into life in the trenches but my grandfather had long since passed away and, anyway had never talked of his war experiences. So I turned to my old hard backed 1930s copy of his best-selling novel ‘Bretherton’ and there found exactly what I needed.
The plot ‘demands’, as the Publishers Circle said at the time, ‘a certain measure of credulity’ but the evocation of period, place and visceral experience in the frontline on both sides of the conflict is outstanding. One particular image stands out: Gerald Bretherton, the central protagonist, crawling through the mud and filth of no-man’s-land, accidentally pushing his arm into the decomposing body of a dead soldier. It was not just the horror of the image but the fact that our Grandpa Peter (as his 11 grandchildren knew him) had surely undergone just such an experience himself and had known any number of his readers would also have done so.
The production was a great success and I was very happy to have at last made proper acquaintance with ‘Bretherton’. My father had a full collection of our grandfather’s novels but I had only ventured to read a few short stories and his only ‘whodunit’, ‘Goring’s First Case’ when I was a teenager. Since then I had read one other ‘The Hold Up’ largely because it was set in the Auvergne, a part of France with which I had fallen in love ignorant of the fact my grandfather and grandmother had honey-mooned in Clermont-Ferrand, its principal city.
My Grandpa Peter was my favourite grandparent. He was gentle, kind and generous and I still vividly remember wandering with him around the streets of Norwich where he had returned to live with his sisters Nellie and Vi after the death of his wife, my Grandma Morris. Reading ‘Bretherton’ so many years after his death brought him tangibly closer and allowed me perhaps to see more clearly the man behind author of what we would now call a ‘blockbuster’.
It was a strange kind of serendipity then, that my elder brother Trevor told us in 2015 that his daughter Olivia had discovered plans by Casemate to republish Bretherton as part of a series of World War One novels. Naturally, we were all very excited and quickly uncovered an extensive and fascinating, if strangely incomplete, family archive covering W.F. Morris’s life and publications. My 95 year old Aunt Audrey, his eldest child, was able to provide some additional detail but in many ways it is the absences of knowledge that are most interesting. For example no one has any idea for what he was mentioned in despatches nor for what act of courage he won the Military Cross. Nor do we know for sure what work he did after retiring from his post as history master at St Benedict’s school in Ealing in 1938. There are photographs of him with colleagues credited to British Industrial Film after this date. So we can perhaps assume he was working in the emerging advertising industry but unless further research is undertaken we will not know for certain.
In any event I determined to get to further grips with Major W. F Morris’s oeuvre. I have recently finished ‘Behind the Lines’ and am struck by several things. Firstly, that it is actually better crafted than ‘Bretherton’ but has a similar quality of vivid depiction. The characters are more fully drawn and credible and the central inciting event both fully ‘earned’ by the narrative and believable. It also offers a disturbing insight not just to life in the trenches and behind the lines but also into the class attitudes prevalent at the time. A striking aspect of two of the other novels I have read is also present in ‘Behind the Lines’ (or ‘The Strange Case of Gunner Rawley’ as it was known in USA). My Grandfather clearly had an intense preoccupation with identity. Gerald Bretherton is suffering from what we would probably now misdiagnose as schizophrenia, many of the central characters in ‘The Hold Up’ are pretending to be someone they are not and Peter Rawley in ‘Behind the Lines’ finds his life suddenly snapped into the nightmare mirror image of whom he thought himself to be.
Casemate’s republication of my Grandpa Peter’s books has been the cause of much real pleasure. Not only have I been enormously impressed with the quality of his writing but I have also gained insights into the man and his times in a way I simply didn’t expect. Both ‘Bretherton’ and ‘Behind the Lines’ are ‘rattling good yarns’ but much more besides. Each offers an unexpectedly unflinching look into the world of trench warfare; its camaraderie; its humour; its characters and its horrors. In this centenary year of the Battle of the Somme that is to be applauded, ‘lest we forget’.
Casemate’s Classic War Fiction series presents collectable editions of forgotten masterpieces to offer unflinching and honest portrayals of life at war. Eight titles have published and are available to purchase now with more in the pipeline. Click here to find out more.
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